9/11

50-55% of Americans (the number that actually vote) still indulge themselves in the narrative that voting in the Presidential election gives them some influence over the direction their country takes, and provides them with the feeling of having some personal power. The other 45-50% that don't vote get the same feeling by supporting their favorite sports team or emotionally attaching themselves to the daily life choices of their preferred celebrity.

In terms of the 'bigger picture', this year's election is something of a watershed. For the first time the US population is being emotionally manipulated to not just choose between Democrat and Republican, but between two candidates that are clearly (even to the average American) reprehensible assholes. At the same time, the people are being encouraged and manipulated to find as many ways as possible to ignore the fact that the candidates are disgusting individuals, and choose one anyway.

The sane response to being offered either a shit sandwich or a shitshake is to refuse both, but apparently a decent percentage of Americans have, in essence, lost their senses.

For 5 years, bloody mayhem has been going on in Syria, and in all that time only independent media has picked up on the really obvious flaw in the official narrative about the "Syrian civil war" ...

Officially, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) is a UK-based organization providing data to the Western press about troop movements, government policy and public sentiment in Syria. The Western press then reprints the information they are given - no questions asked:

What Western media editors conceal from the public however, is that the "Syrian Observatory for Human Rights" is neither based in Syria nor is it an observer of what actually goes on there. It is essentially one man - Abdul Rahman, aka Rami Abdulrahman, aka Osama Suleiman - a three-term convicted criminal in Syria, based out of a small house in Coventry, England, and his 'team of four activists in Syria'.

Apparently all it takes to inform the entire Western media about everything that is happening on the ground in Syria is four people. Four people could, theoretically, provide reasonably objective reports, but only if they were open to receiving information from many sources, including ones supportive of the Syrian government. They might even be able to produce - using objective discernment - reliable statistics of casualties, refugees and terrorists/rebels. But SOHR has consistently reported the 'civil war' from only the perspective of the so-called 'rebels', discounting Syrian government reports out of hand, as well as reports from civilians that reveal rebels' crimes.

That fact alone makes SOHR about as reliable a source of information on the Syrian conflict as the US State Department and the British Foreign Office, who have a vested interest in spinning the war to produce one end: the death or removal of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

After 15 years of wars, a majority of US service members are deeply skeptical about America's foreign interventions. The US should focus on homeland defense and jobs instead of invading and "stabilizing" countries like Afghanistan or Iraq, a new poll shows.

Most active-duty members of the US military would prefer the government to refrain from overseas missions involving so-called nation-building, a number of costly and ambiguous efforts to reconstruct post-war countries, according to a poll run by the Military Times and Syracuse University's Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF).

The survey, described by the Military Times as a first-of-its-kind study, included a question: "How do you view the US government's continued involvement in nation-building efforts, establishing democracies in the Middle East and North Africa using US military and financial support?"

About 55 percent of service members said they "strongly oppose"or "somewhat oppose" those efforts, while 23 percent responded positively to an idea of carrying out such missions. The remaining 22 percent were either unsure or of no opinion on the issue.

The goal of the terrible terror attack in Nice on July 14th was to divide French society between Muslims and non-Muslims. But who is really responsible for the new mass killing of ordinary French citizens? One Frenchman, at least, seems to understand the truth.

Social tension in the US appears to be at a boiling point. In the span of a week we have seen the deaths of two civilians - Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota - at the hands of cops. The two deaths were caught on video and have further enraged public opinion in the US, in particular among the black community, which has borne the brunt of police brutality for many years. Within a few days of the slaying of Sterling and Castile, five police officers were shot dead by "a sniper" during a 'Black Lives Matter' march in Dallas, held in protest against the police killing of the two men. Is someone trying to stir things up in the USA?

On Tuesday July 5th, Alton Sterling, 37, was selling CDs for cash outside a store in Baton Rouge, as he did most days. On this particular day he was approached by a homeless man who repeatedly asked him for money. Sterling told the man to leave him alone several times before resorting to showing the man that he was armed. The previous day Sterling had purchased the weapon for his own protection. "He didn't have a gun before that," barber Ronnie Harton, 50, told the New York Daily News. "He said he had to protect himself, because he had all this money on him [from selling CDs]. Around this area, you get robbed real quick."

Perhaps resentful that his requests for money were rebuffed by Sterling, the homeless man called 911 on his cell phone and told police that there was an "armed man in the parking lot." When police arrived and confronted Sterling, he was tackled to the ground, tased and, apparently because police were told he was carrying a firearm, publicly executed with two shots in the chest and four in the back.

Comment: The 9/11 effect: What happens when the "world's only superpower" decides that it needs to demonize 1.5 billion Muslims in order to justify its imperial expansion into Muslim countries (and everywhere else) in order to keep Russia contained, and it does this for 15 straight years?

Japan, on the other side of the planet from the USA, starts to demonize Muslims too. When that happens, ya know the mind-job is pretty much complete.The Supreme Court of Japan has upheld the government's right to continue the mass surveillance of Muslim residents, places of worship, halal restaurants, and other institutions related to the practice of Islam.

The decision came from a second court appeal in a case of Japanese Muslims who argued that the broad monitoring is unconstitutional, invades their privacy, and infringes on their freedom of religion.

"They made us terrorist suspects," Mohamed Fujita, one of the plaintiffs in the case, told Al Jazeera. "We never did anything wrong — on the contrary."

Due to widespread Islamophobia many US citizens are rushing to blame Islamist radicalism for an "pandemic" of mass shootings and do not realize that the government's own gun policies only fuel the violence, RT America's Chris Hedges believes.

Although most people in the US assume the radical ideology and Islamic terrorism are behind the present-day rampage, the fact is that mass shootings are an inevitable consequence of the US domestic policy, Hedges said.

"Islamophobia runs deep in the United States. I think when people hear about mass shootings before the name of the perpetrator is released because of the long "war on terror" there's often an unstated assumption that there is a connection to radical Islamic militancy. But, in fact, mass shootings, unfortunately, in the United States are endemic," Hedges told RT.

"It's a confluence of the gun culture of the nihilistic rage that grips the underclass in the United States and figures such as this particular shooter are easily seduced by ideologies that sanction this," he added saying that the latest massacre in Orlando will "stoke" even more Islamophobia in the US.

Hedges said that the current gun policy has only worsened the security situation in the country.

Have you ever believed something someone said and then found out it was a lie? You remember the initial feeling of shock and indignation, followed by anger at the audacity of the liar and then perhaps depression that human beings are prone to such weakness and insincerity. Then you might have struggled to understand why, and maybe you achieved that understanding, or not.

Being lied to is undoubtedly something that most people have experienced, and it's a valuable experience in that, ideally, it enables us to spot lies and liars before they cause us too much harm or heartache. The point being, everyone knows that people lie, that they justify some things they do with lies to themselves and others. The reason people lie is generally well understood also. We all live our lives according to a spoken or unspoken set of rules or values. When what a person wants conflicts with those rules, they resort to lying to cover up their momentary departure from living a moral life. Such lies can be conscious or unconscious.

What most people rarely, if ever, experience in the course of their lives, however, is a person who lies as a matter of course or who makes a lifestyle out of lying. We're talking here about someone for whom what they want is always at odds with conventional morality and they can therefore never be honest or express what they really think, feel and want out of fear of being utterly rejected (or worse) by their peers. Such a person would constitute a fundamentally deviant or abnormal human being. They might be fully aware that their desires sharply diverge from those of the average person and actively seek to cover them up with lies, or they may simply react 'instinctively' in each moment with a lie in a (largely unconscious) effort to preserve their ability to exploit others in service to their unwholesome desires.

Where would we be without Bin Laden? Or rather, where would the US Empire's rationale to justify wars of aggression be without Bin Laden?

Wherever he is right now, the lanky Saudi playboy cum jihadi has every right to feel proud of the role he was co-opted to play by the pioneers of the phony war on terror. After all, he and he alone 'did' 9/11. The scramble to 'get him' for 'doing 9/11' allowed for a US military take over of Afghanistan and, with a few blatant lies repeated ad nauseam by the Western press, Iraq was overrun too. That's a lot of return on the energy invested in turning the son of a Saudi millionaire into the bete noire of the freedom-loving peoples of the world.

Once Afghanistan and Iraq were 'done' however, Osama was retreated to his mysteriously inaccessible-to-all-but-Allah mountain cave, and 'al-Qaeda' took over for the next few years of securing freedom and democracy for the Middle East, which took the unusual form of destroying as much of it as possible.

By the time 2011 rolled around, US and NATO warmongers were getting a bit peckish again, and Syria and Libya were lined up for obliteration. But al-Qaeda had become a bit 'old' and no one had seen Osama for years, except in the form of grainy videos of some guy who looked a bit like him. So from the rubble of Iraq, "ISIS" was launched onto the geopolitical scene to replace 'al-qaeda' who the USA government was now actively funding and arming in Syria and Libya.

But to facilitate his definitive exit from the stage, bin Laden was to take one last hit for the Secret Team as the victim of the 'heroic Navy Seal raid' on his 'compound' in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a popular retirement and holiday retreat for Pakistani military and civilian intelligence. This was a bizarre choice of hiding place for the world's (then) most wanted man, especially since it was located just a few kms away from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point and the CIA had an office there. Then again, very little ever makes sense in the phony war on terror that is used as a cover for imperial wars of aggression.

Remember September 11th, 2001? Every man woman and true-blue child in the USA was up in arms. The outrage! The audacity! This is war! Who dunnit?! The American people were shocked, traumatized, and needed to chill and think things through, but their government had a better idea: ride the deliberately manufactured tidal wave of emotion over to the Middle East, with the US military in tow, to get the one man responsible: Osama bin Laden. Sure!

A few hastily-cobbled-together intelligence reports and a few weeks of mass news coverage later, and the whole nation was, predictably, baying for the blood of not just Osama, but all those sand-nigger, camel-jockeying, towel-head t'rrists, wherever they might be! (Or wherever the government claims they might be.) I mean, how DARE they! This is AY-MURIKA!

So where was he, this Osamy? His home country of Saudi Arabia? No! He was hiding out in Afghanistan with the Taliban! The very same Taliban that the US funded and armed in the 80s to keep the Soviets out. But, make no mistake, it was pure coincidence that the 9/11 attacks were once again leading to direct US involvement in the geopolitically strategic nation of Afghanistan, and for exactly the same reason. We'll have none of your 'conspiracy theories' here!